This is a comprehensive list of my sources of income, and any hospitality or gifts I receive (except from family and friends), beginning in September 2011.

I have opened this registry because I believe that journalists should live by the standards they demand of others, among which are accountability and transparency. One of the most important questions in public life, which is asked less often than it should be, is “who pays?”.

Until members of parliament were obliged to reveal their external earnings, we had no means of knowing whether the positions they took were influenced by the money they made: whether, in other words, they were acting on our behalf or acting on behalf of hidden sponsors. Many of the thinktanks and campaign groups which claim to be independent often sound uncannily like corporate lobbyists. When they refuse to reveal the sources of their funding, the public has good reason to be suspicious. Several journalists have been exposed for what, in the United States, are called payola scandals. It would not be surprising to discover that others were taking undisclosed payments for championing certain interests.

I think he is trying to make a point, don't you?

The point he is trying to make is the point environmental campaigners from Al Gore to CACC are always making all the time forever ad nauseam, viz: the only reason sceptical scientists and journalists say the sceptical things they do is because they are ALL IN THE PAY OF BIG OIL. (Or Big Koch; or Big Carbon; or similar).

I devote a whole chapter to this subject in my book Watermelons. Monbiot should read it. He'd learn a lot.

There are various things I explain, very patiently, on this score. The first concerns what Jamie Whyte calls the "Motive Fallacy".

This is the demonstrably false notion that if you have some particular interest (financial or otherwise) in holding an opinion this must automatically render it untrue.

Whyte offers a simple example in his book Bad Thoughts: A Guide To Clear Thinking, "A man may stand to gain a great deal of peace and quiet from telling his wife that he loves her. But he may really love her nevertheless."

The fact that Monbiot and his fellow environmentalists cannot grasp this speaks volumes about the blinkered nature of their ideology. It simply does not occur to them that those on the other side of the argument might actually hold the views they hold sincerely and honestly. Perhaps it's because they've repeated the "In the pay of Big Oil" myth so often that they've brainwashed themselves into believing it. This is certainly preferable to the alternative explanation which is that they know it's a crock but find it a convenient propaganda slur with which to close down the argument.

Anyway, it just doesn't stand up. As Jo Nova showed a while back, the amount spent by Big Government (and its various corporate shills and environmental NGOs and left-leaning charitable foundations) spreading the Man Made Global Warming meme dwarfs the amount spent on us starving sceptics by about 3,500 to one.

No, the people toward whom Monbiot really ought to be directing his righteous rage are not climate sceptics but his fellow environmental activists. People like NASA's James Hansen, for example.

The lawsuit claims Hansen privately profited from his public job in violation of federal ethics rules, and NASA allowed him to do it because of his influence in the media and celebrity status among environmental groups, which rewarded him handsomely the last four years.

Gifts, speaking fees, prizes and consulting compensation include:

– A shared $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation for his "profound contribution to humanity." Hansen's cut ranged from $333,000 to $500,000, Horner said, adding that the precise amount is not known because Hansen's publicly available financial disclosure form only shows the prize was "an amount in excess of $5,000."

– A $15,000 participation fee, waived by the W.J. Clinton Foundation for its 2009 Waterkeeper Conference.

– $720,000 in legal advice and media consulting services provided by The George Soros Open Society Institute. Hansen said he did not take "direct" support from Soros but accepted "pro bono legal advice."

In his latest coup, Horner has obtained the 2010 filing of the SF 278 public financial disclosure document which senior public officials in the US are obliged to fill in for transparency and anti-corruption purposes. For the first time he reports in-kind travel expenses: $59,750 in in-kind income for travel in 2010 alone.
$26k, $18k and $7k for apparently first-class travel to Australia,
Japan and Norway, respectively for he and his wife, among other things.

What's more the documents show that in a period of five years, Hansen earned in outside income between $1.47 million and $2.67 million, in addition to his basic salary as a government employee of $180,000.

Under the terms of contract governing that salary, Hansen is forbidden from privately benefiting from public office and from taking money for activities related to his taxpayer funded employment.

Maybe Monbiot, for whom transparency is clearly such an issue, should investigate.